Friday, September 11, 2009

Last week I noticed that the large “Welcome to Ellicott City” sign painted on the CSX railroad bridge on the county line had recently been repainted. It looks great. I knew by looking closely at the lower right hand corner of the sign and seeing “HCFR 2A” that the local fire department had something to do with this.

A quick visit to Fire Station 2 on Montgomery Road in Ellicott City revealed the story. There, in the main corridor of the station, is a newspaper article from October 2003 and a large picture of six firefighters and paramedics perched above the 1931 railroad bridge and it’s newly painted welcome sign.

The project was the brainchild of firefighter and paramedic, Wendy McCord who first fell in love with Ellicott City back in 1993 when she was a student at UMBC in Catonsville. She cajoled Captain Bill Rosier, Lieutenant Joe Ross, Ashley Tarfufo, Larry Yates and Tim Hann into helping her transform an often graffiti covered railroad bridge into a welcoming gateway to the mill town and the county. It took her 11 months to secure all the approvals needed to get the job done. Duron donated the paint and Home Depot donated the supplies.

Six years later the appropriately colored “caboose red” sign needed a spruce up. This time Wendy did the job solo. Nice job Wendy!

Earlier this week I wrote a post about the “green” parking spaces at the new Medical Pavilion office building on the Howard County General Hospital campus. I also went inside the building to check out the lobby.

The lobby is actually a two story affair with the lower portion featuring a nice seating area for visitors. Just outside this seating area is an outdoor rock garden. When I took a closer look I was surprised to find that some folks had already taken to creating rock sculptures like people have been doing in the Patapsco River in Ellicott City.

I don’t know if the building architect intended his rock garden feature to be used in this manner but it certainly is an interesting consequence of his design.

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This is a personal web log about stuff around here. The opinions and views of the blogger are just that, opinions and views of the blogger, not the bloggers employer, parish priest, probation officer or anyone else for that matter. Comments posted here may be attributable to others. If the content presented here offends you in some way you are probably taking yourself too seriously. If it is journalism that you are looking for, buy a newspaper.